


If You’ve Seen Me At My Lowest...

by janey_p



Series: Fluffvember 2020 [4]
Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Fluff, Fluffvember 2020, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Pre-Slash, Prompt Fill, Sleep Deprivation, does making breakfast count as aftercare? :D, some at least, supportive Gordon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:41:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27311335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janey_p/pseuds/janey_p
Summary: Everyone has a breaking point, and Thomas had reached his last night. Thankfully, Gordon had been there to pick up the pieces. Quite literally, in fact.
Relationships: Gordon Katsumoto/Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV
Series: Fluffvember 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1992121
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	If You’ve Seen Me At My Lowest...

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #4: **“You found me crying on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night surrounded by a shattered jelly jar.”**
> 
> The fluff is slow in coming, but it’s there at the end. I promise.  
> This is the second “Watch me!” prompt. :D

Thomas woke up in stages. 

At first, it was only a stray beam of sunlight that teased him. He groaned, buried his face into the pillow, and dozed off again. 

The feeling that something was off tried to drag him back from sleep a little while later. Sunlight? In his bedroom? Just how late was it? The thought took root in the back of his head, but his eyes refused to open, feeling as if they had been glued shut. He groaned again and decided that he wasn’t ready to get up yet. He drifted—half-awake, feeling boneless, almost floaty—the way he tended to do when his sleep schedule had been thoroughly shaken up for a while. 

A rustle next to him sent a jolt through him and had him alert in record time. His eyes _still_ refused to open, but there was no chance of him being able to fall back asleep now. So he tried to take stock of his surroundings by sound alone. The rustling had stopped, but now that he was listening for clues, he was able to hear soft breathing on his left side. 

Someone was between him and the door. He didn’t like that at all! The last couple of weeks had been hell on his inner peace, and having some unknown person in the room with him while he was defenseless, and blocking his exit on top of it, made his skin crawl. 

When the mattress dipped the tiniest amount, his hand shot out from under his blankets, purely on instinct, and made contact with something solid and warm. 

_What?_

With his heart racing now, he finally forced his eyes open and was greeted by far too much light that made pain explode in his temples for a breathless second. The whimper that worked itself up his throat was embarrassing but really couldn’t be helped. Oh, how he wished he were still asleep! 

The stranger on his left chuckled quietly. 

“Hey, are you all right?” 

The voice—sounding amused and concerned in equal measure—was familiar. 

Oh! Well… Wasn’t that embarrassing, too? Realizing who was in the room with him made him remember last night much more clearly than he liked. He’d have to explain himself now, wouldn’t he? That promised to be fun… not.

He dared to look over then and was rewarded with the sight of Gordon sitting on his bed, fully dressed and looking annoyingly well-rested, his back propped up against the headboard, looking down at him with a raised eyebrow. 

Yeah, Thomas wouldn’t be able to stall for long. And just pretending that last night hadn’t happened wouldn’t work either. Gordon would just bring it up sometime later, and he’d rather not have a potential audience for the impending discussion. 

But no matter how off his game he felt right now, he still couldn’t hold back his usual sass. 

“Just peachy. Why? What does it look like to you?” 

“Do you want an honest answer?”

Huh? How much higher could that eyebrow go? 

“Eh… Probably not. I’d be grateful if you could spare my feelings this early in the morning.” 

“It’s almost noon,” came the dry reply. 

Ugh… So that explained the sun. But still… 

“That’s early morning in my current books. Shut up.” 

“You tend to have better comebacks.”

“That’s what you get when you catch me before breakfast…” He sighed but decided that if the guy wanted to stick around, he could at least make himself useful. “Could I ask you to throw something together while I take a shower? I promise I’ll be better company afterward.” 

Gordon pretended to think about it, and just before an itchy feeling had time to crawl down Thomas’s back, he shrugged and got up. 

“Just this once,” he told Thomas, rather magnanimously, and left the room without closing the door, the bastard. 

*** * ***

Fifteen minutes and a hot shower later, Thomas felt marginally better prepared to face the day. 

The smell of bacon, eggs, and coffee that greeted him upon entering the kitchen was almost enough for him to pretend it was a morning like any other. Just that there wasn’t someone at his stove, preparing breakfast for him, on _normal_ mornings.

He sat down at the table with a sigh but gratefully accepted the plate that was set before him. And Gordon was kind enough to wait until he had cleared even the last crumb off his plate before asking the dreaded question.

“So. What exactly did I witness… earlier today?”

“You found me crying on the kitchen floor, in the middle of the night, surrounded by a shattered jelly jar,” Thomas quipped, just a touch bitter. “Not one of my finer moments.”

“Hey, I’m not judging you. Better to let it all out than to bottle it up. But may I ask what brought that on? I like to think I know you pretty well by now, and that wasn’t like you at all.” 

“Shows what you know!” he muttered viciously but felt bad about it before the last word had left his mouth. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. My hang-ups aren’t your fault. I’m just so damn tired lately, and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep today aren’t enough to make up for almost two weeks of less than five hours per night.”

“Ouch. What happened?” 

“The Miller case happened.” 

“Miller… Oh! You mean the torture victim?” Gordon winced. “Right. Should probably have guessed that.” 

“Why would you? I’ve done my best to cover up how much it affected me.” 

“Still, I feel like an ass right now, for the way I snapped at you the other day.”

“Don’t worry about it. You were right then, and I can take it.”

“Didn’t look like it, a few hours ago.” 

Gordon really had no right to sound so skeptical.

“Okay, let me rephrase: _Usually_ ,I can take it. I could definitely take it that day. Last night…” Thomas paused, staring hard at his hands, and tried to order his thoughts. “... last night, there were just several things that piled on top of each other. Sure, the sleep deprivation was already starting to get to me before that, but I had only gotten maybe half an hour of sleep before a nightmare woke me up again. Getting something sweet to eat sounded like a good idea at the time, but I was all shaky, so _of course_ I dropped that stupid jar. And the jelly was that unfortunate shade of red. Guess that was one detail too many.” He shrugged and looked up again. “Sorry I woke you up, though.”

“I didn’t mind. I’m glad I could help a little.” 

It sounded sincere enough that Thomas believed him. It made him snort anyway.

“‘A little,’ he says. _Eight hours_ , Gordon! Without nightmares, for once. Do you know how much that means to me?”

Awww, would you look at that? The man could blush! It was only a faint red, nothing too obvious, but Thomas caught it and felt oddly charmed.

“You’re still not fully recovered, though,” Gordon said, trying to talk his accomplishment down.

“Yeah, no… That’s going to take some more time. But this is a good start, even if I had to hit rock bottom first. So, thanks. Really.”

Gordon’s answering smile made something warm bloom in his chest. So, before he could do something else embarrassing today, like starting to blush himself, he pointed at Gordon, half-joking, half-serious.

“But don’t you dare breathe a word of this to anyone else!”

*** * ***

Something had been niggling at Thomas ever since he’d entered the kitchen earlier. Something was _different_ about the room, apart from the company. And he had yet to figure out what.

When they finally cleared the table, Thomas repeatedly caught himself staring at his spotless kitchen floor, for some reason. And then—quite suddenly—it clicked.

“Hey, Gordon. What happened to the mess of goo and shards I left here last night?”

“I wiped it up.”

“When?” 

Gordon had come to investigate the noise shortly after the jar had shattered on the tiles, had assessed the situation, and promptly gone into crisis management mode. He had asked questions that went unanswered because Thomas had still been too out of it to process them. He had made sure that Thomas was uninjured and then carefully led him out of the kitchen and back to his bedroom.

Thomas could still remember how he had all but begged Gordon to stay close after he’d managed to get under the covers. Gordon had settled on the bed, next to him, and had still been there, in the exact same pose, when Thomas woke up again.

So when had he had the time to make the kitchen look like nothing had happened at all?

“By the time you were asleep, the sun was already rising. I figured that I could leave you alone for a while without anything disastrous happening. So I went to make sure the goo and shards—as you called them—wouldn’t fuse themselves to the floor. I know from experience how sticky drying jelly is. The longer you wait, the more frustrating the clean-up.”

“Oh man, I’m gonna owe you so much for this…”

“No, you won’t. Under different circumstances, I’d have milked this for sure. But I’m feeling generous today. Consider it a gift,” Gordon winked.

Despite that parting tease, Thomas had a hard time fighting the sudden urge to hug Gordon. But since he wasn’t entirely convinced it would be welcome, he manfully kept his hands to himself. Besides, with all the emotional upheaval he’d been through in the last few hours, he might not have been able to let go for quite some time.

“It’s probably a good thing that I accidentally fell asleep on your couch,” Gordon added after a pause. “Who knows what would have happened if I’d gone home?”

“Could have gone either way,” Thomas shrugged. “I could have just gone back to sleep, or it could have ended with a trip to the emergency room because I managed to step on a shard. In both cases, the mess would still be here. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to remove the health hazard. Future me would have been _delighted_.”

“It would have been a fun way for you to spend your afternoon,” Gordon grinned but got serious again right after. “Speaking of which… It’s not like I don’t want to spend more time here…”

“But you have a late shift coming up. I remember.”

Gordon actually looked regretful, and it made Thomas smile.

“It’s okay. Really. You can go be the knight in shining armor for some other people now.”

Gordon’s answering eye-roll felt strangely like a reward.

*** * ***

That night, when he went to bed, Thomas caught Gordon’s scent, still faintly clinging to the pillow the man had sat on in the morning. He tucked it closer to himself and shamelessly took a deep breath. 

It should probably surprise him how fast he relaxed afterward, but somehow it didn’t. It felt like a logical consequence of the day’s events instead. 

The dread he’d felt upon realizing that Gordon had witnessed his meltdown had made way for relief when it became clear that Gordon wouldn’t use it against him. In an abstract way, Thomas had known that Gordon wasn’t that kind of man, but he hadn’t been able to stop worrying anyway. Must have been the post-breakdown paranoia… 

Now, though, with the pillow in his arms, he could pretend that Gordon was still keeping watch. If he was lucky, that meant he’d get another night without bad dreams or flashbacks.

He fell asleep, feeling safe.


End file.
